When the people have political unrest, then it’s no surprise that we turn to weaponry and violence to solve our problems with the way society has worked for centuries. There have been both attempted and successful assassinations on presidents of the United States in the past, and it seems to be never-ending with the latest alleged assassination attempts on current U.S. President Donald Trump.
On Saturday, April 25, 2026, there was a heavily armed man named Cole Tomas Allen who snuck into the hotel Washington Hilton while President Trump was hosting the White House Correspondent’s Dinner. It isn’t confirmed that he was there to actually try and kill Trump, but it is assumed. One Secret Service agent with a bulletproof vest was shot, but not fatally harmed, and Allen was taken into custody. He was charged with an attempted assasination, but pleaded not guilty His apparent motive was a hatred towards Trump and his entire administration, but his motive is the main thing that the authorities are working on. According to the New York Times, a federal affidavit shows an email he sent out soon before his arrival to the Washington Hilton, and “the email, the affidavit said, also listed Mr. Allen’s targets and said that administration officials — aside from the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel — were ‘prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest.’” He is only one of the people willing to turn to violence for political means.
Trump has made many policies and tried to pass laws that millions in the U.S. greatly disagree with, and people will go to measures to express those. Whether it’s unlawful deportations, offensive comments, or restricting laws that go against the Constitution and the amendments, people of the U.S. are understandably angry. This doesn’t fully explain why there have been alleged attempted assassinations of Trump – but it gives us some insight on the rage that many Americans must be feeling and the lengths that they will go to in the way that we know best: with guns and violence.
So many problems worldwide have been solved, or have been attempted to be solved, through war and violence. This can be shown through events as big as one of the World Wars, or just through killings of individuals, whether they were in power or not. As much as this world has progressed, the root of a lot of our problems still lie at the fact that we solve so much through not well thought out violence, whether or not the people deserve it.
There are plenty of famous presidential assassinations in the history of the United States, most famously the ones of President Abraham Lincoln and of President John F. Kennedy. People clearly view violence and killing as the answer to political problems ever since the start of this country.
That brings us to an important question: what will successfully assassinating the president actually achieve? One ideal solution for many Americans would be for the people to take back the power, and to put someone new in charge, no matter who that person was. In reality, though, it would just make things more chaotic and complicated. Vice President JD Vance would most likely take over, and he would have similar opinions as the previous president, and might not be able to get this country out of the holes that President Trump dug us in. The country would erupt into even more chaos, because there are so many confusing and fragile relationships with other countries that Trump has started. We, as a country, must focus on other pathways to get us to where we want to be, not just violence.
